humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

On Mar 1, 12:22 pm, Dennis wrote:
> On Mar 1, 11:35 am, Dennis wrote:
>
> > A HIT, a very PALPABLE HIT. (Hamlet)
>
> >http://hollowaypages.com/images/DROES.JPG
>
> > CRITES/JONSON. The Dor, the Dor, the Dor, the Dor, the Dor, the
> > PALPABLE
> > DOR! (Cynthia's Revels)
>



http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/shakespeare-folio2.bmp

Droeshout

DOR...He's Out

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_Every Man Out of his Humour_, Jonson

Asper. I not observ'd this thronged Round till now.
Gracious and kind Spectators, you are welcome;
Apollo and the Muses feast your Eyes
With graceful Objects, and may our Minerva
Answer your Hopes, unto their largest Strain.
Yet here mistake me not, Judicious Friends:
I do not this, to beg your Patience,
Or servilely to fawn on your Applause,
Like some dry Brain, despairing in his Merit.
Let me be censur'd by th' austerest Brow,
Where I want Art or Judgment, tax me freely:
Let envious Censors, with their broadest Eyes,
Look through and through me, I pursue no Favour;
Only vouchsafe me your Attentions,
And I will give you Musick worth your Ears.
O, how I hate the monstrousness of Time,
Where every servile imitating Spirit,
(Plagu'd with an itching Leprosie of Wit)
In a meer halting Fury, strives to fling
His Ulc'rous Body in the Thespian Spring,
And streight leaps forth a Poet! but as lame
As Vulcan, or the Founder of Cripplegate.
Mit. In faith this Humour will come ill to some,
You will be thought to be too peremptory.
Asp. This Humour? good! And why this Humour, Mitis?
Nay, do not turn, but answer. Mit. Answer? what?
Asp. I will not stir your Patience, pardon me,
I urg'd it for some Reasons, and the rather
To give these ignorant well-spoken Days
Some Taste of their Abuse of this word Humour.
Cor. O, do not let your Purpose fall, good Asper;
It cannot but arrive most acceptable,
Chiefly to such as have the happiness
Daily to see how the poor innocent Word
Is rackt and tortur'd. Mit. I, I pray you proceed.
Asp. Ha? what? what is't? Cor. For the abuse of Humour.
Asp. O, I crave pardon, I had lost my Thoughts.
Why, Humour (as 'tis ens) we thus define it,
To be a Quality of Air, or Water,
And in it self holds these two Properties,
Moisture and Fluxure: As, for demonstration,
Pour Water on this Floor, 'twill wet and run:
Likewise the Air (forc'd through a Horn or Trumpet)
Flows instantly away, and leaves behind
A kind of Dew; and hence we do conclude,
That whatsoe're hath Fluxure and Humidity,
As wanting power to contain it self,
Is Humour. So in every Humane Body,
The Choler, Melancholy, Phlegm, and Blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one Part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours. Now thus far
It may, by Mataphor, apply it self
Unto the general Disposition:
As when some one peculiar Quality
Doth so possess a Man, that it doth draw
All his Affects, his Spirits, and his Powers,
In their Confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.
But that a Rook by wearing a py'd Feather,
The Cable Hatband, or the three-pil'd Ruff,
A Yard of Shoe-tye, or the Switzer's Knot
On his French Garters, should affect a Humour!
O, it is more than most ridiculous.
Cor. He speaks pure Truth now; if an Idiot
Have but an apish or fantastick Strain,
It is his Humour. Asp. *Well, I will scourge those Apes,
And to these courteous Eyes oppose a Mirrour,
As large as is the Stage whereon we act;
Where they shall see the Times Deformity
Anatomiz'd in every Nerve and Sinew*,
With constant Courage, and contempt of Fear.
Mit. Asper, (I urge it as your Friend) take heed,
The Days are dangerous, full of exception,
And Men are grown impatient of Reproof. Asp. Ha, ha!
You might as well have told me, Yond' is Heaven,
This Earth, these Men, and all had mov'd alike.
Do not I know the Times Condition?
Yes, Mitis, and their Souls, and who they be
That either will or can except 'gainst me,
None but a sort of Fools, so sick in taste,
That they contemn all Physick of the Mind,
And, like glad Camels, kick at every touch.
Good Men, and vertuous Spirits, that loath their Vices,
Will cherish my free Labours, love my Lines,
And with the fervor of their shining Grace
Make my Brain fruitful, to bring forth more Objects
Worthy their serious and intentive Eyes.
But why enforce I this? as fainting? No.
If any here chance to behold himself,
Let him not dare to challenge me of Wrong;
For, if he shame to have his Follies known,
First he should shame to act 'em: My strict Hand
Was made to seise on Vice, and with a Gripe
Squeeze out the Humour of such Spongy Natures,
As lick up every idle Vanity.

*******************************

"The Mouth of 'hem All:' Ben Jonson, Authorship, and the PERFORMING
OBJECT
Scott Cutler Shershow
"Motions" and Mobility

<reflected and shaped an allegedly transparent series of cultural and
social hierarchies. Accordingly, the puppet or performing object
figures within a variety of interrelated philosophic, scientific and
theological discourses, which thus may be seen to illuminate not only
one another but also theatrical authorship as playwrights such as
Jonson conceived it. In the early modern period, for example, a
"motion" could refer to "an inward prompting or impulse, an
instigation or incitement from within"; to those physical gestures
which manifest and express that inner impulse; and to a puppet show or
any kind of moveable figure or automaton. The work "puppet" itself
could refer either to a doll or to a histrionic vehicle of
performance, the latter distinguished from the former precisely by
those external mechanical gestures of "motions' that manifest it's
(illusory) internal "motions." Early modern science conceived of human
behaviour, in not dissimilar terms, as essentially mechanistic: the
internal activity of the "sensitive soul' (as distinct from the
"vegetative" and "rational" souls) was believed to be the precedent
and efficient cause of an animate being's external actions. John
Bulwer's Chironomia (1644) for example describes and illustrates a
system of sign language grounded in the conventional idea that "the
hand...by gesture makes the inward motions of the minde most evident."
Both rhetorical pronunciato and theatrical "playing" were understood
to involve an appropriate combination of gesture and speech, a
correspondence between the motion and the (e)motion. Jonson argues in
Discoveries:

Do wee not see, if the mind languish, the members are dull? Look upon
an effeminate person: his very gate confesseth him. If a man be fiery,
his motion is so: if angry,"tis troubled and violent'

Here Jonson uses the word to express the external manifestation of the
internal personality; as he describes it, the latter constitutes the
higher ontological reality, while the former is merely its guise,
appearance or index (" If a man be fiery, his motion is so".) The word
"motion" constantly slips between the two sides of the physio-
psychological opposition which it also predicates, linking biology and
behaviour, rhetoric and theatre, within a transparent system of
correspondences.

Such a system inevitable also had a theological dimension: the
same word that refers to the subject's own inner impulses could also
refer to "a working of God in the sould." This sense of the word,
similarly, links the invisible inner life with those external gestures
that manifest it in the visible world. Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio
Medici, is thus almost making a pun when he asserts that he loves 'to
use the civility of my knee, my hat , and hands, with all those
outward and sensible motions, which may express or promote my
invisible devotion." So conceived, a human being is, once again,
puppet-like: a passive, material body filled by the breath, spirit, or
inspiration that descends from some transcendent sphere.
Correspondingly, the literal puppet could serve as a paradigmatic
metaphor for the theological descent of spirit into flesh. In John
Marston's _Antonio and Mellida_ (1599), the character Andrugio muses
that

Earthly dirt makes all things, makes the man,
Moulds me up honour and, like a *cunning Dutchman
Paints me a puppet even with seeming breath
And give a sot appearance of a soul.*

Both the corporeal human being, the worldly appearances of "honor" and
degree, and the "seeming breath" of the performing artifact, here are
seen as products of a universal process which invests "earthly dirt"
with literal in-spiration, the breath of life.
This metaphysics of universal embodiment typically merges, in
early modern discourse, with the celebrated Aristotelian idea of human
beings as the most imitative of animals: the notion that Man, as the
so-called "ape of nature," imitates the works of the divine creator.
On a mundane level, "apish" behaviour was also associated either with
the follies of romantic love or with the affectations of social life.
Shakespeare's Rosalind refers to lovers as "proud, fantastical," and "
apish" (AYLI 3.2.412). Mercury, in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600),
chastises those

RIDICULOUS HEADS,
Who with their APISH customes and forc's garbes,
Would bring the name of courtier in contempt. (5.1.34-36)

Here again, this constellation of meaning reflects and is embodied in
the practical conditions of popular performance. There is evidence
throughout the early modern period for a tradition of performing
monkeys, or "baboons," who were lumped together rhetorically with
puppets, "motions," jugglers, and freak shows as crude carnivalesque
entertainments. With both puppets and the performing apes that
figurally and literally resemble them, the linked semantic senses of
diminution or parodic imitation apply both as mere metaphor and as
social description: baboons and puppets are allegedly instance of an
imitation that diminishes, degrades or parodizes its object, and forms
of "low," potentially corrupting entertainment.>>

******************************

"A Living Drollery" (Tempest, III, iii, 21)
M. A. Shaaber
Modern Language Notes, Vol. 60, No. 6. (Jun., 1945), pp. 387-391.

" A Living Drollery" (Tempest, III, iii, 21)

In Sebastian's description of the strange shapes who offer him and his
comrades a banquet, " A living drollery" (Tempest III, iii, 21), the
word DROLLERY is usually explained as "puppet show." This definition,
so far as I can learn, is due to Steevens, who annotated this passage
with the statement that "Shows, called Drolleries, were, in
Shakespeare's time, performed by puppets only." It has been passed on
by Nares, Dyce, and all the editors; indeed, only Schmidt seems to
have felt doubta about is. It stands, I think, in need of closer
examination.
Omitting several late seventeenth-century uses in which the word
means "a jest" or "jesting," I find eight other early examples in the
NED. And the commentaries, as follows:

Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV (1598), II, I, 155 ff. Glasses, glasses is the
only drinking; and for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the
story of the prodigal, or the German hunting in waterwork, is worth a
thousand of these bed-hangers and these fly-bitten tapestries.

Dekker, The Belman of London (1606), ed. Grosart iii (1885), p.87: The
whole Roome shewed a farre off...like a dutch peece of Drollery" for
they sate at table as if they had been so many ANTICKS: A Painters
prentice could not draw worse FACES than they themselves made, besides
those which God gave them; no, nor a painter himselfe vary a picture
into more strange and more ill-favord gestures, than were to be seene
in the Action of their bodies.

Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1608), ed. Arber (1880), p.
1: And a Drollerie (or Dutch peece of Lantskop) may sometimes breed in
the beholders eye, as much delectation, as the best and most curious
master-peece excellent in that Art.

Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614), Ind., ed. Herford & Simpson vi
(1938), pp. 16f: If there be never a Servant-monster I' the Fayre; who
can help it? He sayes; nor a nest of ANTIQUES? He is loth to make
Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests,
and such like Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles, let
the concupiscence of Jigges and Dances, raigne as strong as it will
amongst you: yet if the Puppets will please any body, they shall be
entreated to come in.

Fletcher, Valentinian (1614), ed. Glover & Waller iv (1906), p.20:

Claud:
Chimney pieces:
Now heaven have mercy upon me, and young men,
I had rather make a drallery till thirty,
While I am able to endure a tempest,
And bear my fights out bravely, till my tackle
Whistl'd I'th'Wind, and held against all weathers,
While I were able to bear with my tyres,
And so discharge 'em, I would willingly
Live, Marcellina, not till barnacles
Bred in my sides.

Dekker and Massinger, The Virgin Martyr (1620), V, I, ed. Cunningham
(1897), p.29:

As a curious painter,
When he has made some honourable piece,
...hugs
Himself for his rare workmanship - so here,
Will I my drolleries, and bloody landscapes,
Long past wrapt up, unfold, to make me merry.

Fletcher, The Wild-Goose Chase (1621), I,ii, ed. Glover & Waller iv
(1906), p.320:
Our Women the best Linguists, they are Parrats;
O' this side of the Alpes they are nothing but meer Drolleries.

Evelyn, Diary, 13 August 1641, ed. Wheatley (1879), I, 18: We arrived
late at Roterdam, where was their annual marte or faire, so furnished
with pictures (especially Landskips and Drolleries, as they call those
clounish representations).

In the first three quotations, the sixth, and the last, the
meaning fo the word is obvious. It means a grotesque picture or other
graphic representation. Precisely what kind of pictorial
representation is intended may be uncertain and I suspect that several
varieties may be comprehended in these examples, but the implication
of a picture is patent. The word is apparently of French origin, and
the earliest example known to me is found in the Meslanges Historiques
of Pierre de Daint-Julien (Lyons, 1589). It is quite explicit:

<the arms of gentlmen and other devices of honor) the painters, masons,
goldsmiths, cabinetmakers and such sorts of craftsmen, and especially
those imbued with the new (Lutheran) opinions, and on that account
enemies of lordly privilege, desiring to render all equal, indulged
themselves in what they call DROLLERIES; so that in order to show
themselves less well furnished with choice inspirations than perfect
imitators, they gave currency to a new kind of foolish emblems,
letting it be known that , however skillful the hand of such
drollists, at the same time they were woefully lacking in cleverness
and even more in solidity of judgement.
Such being the case, we see that , wishing to represent the arms
of some gentleman which they happen to be concerned with, if the arms
had no device of their own, such as those of which we have spoken in
this discourse and the preceding, they will emblazon (that is to say,
at the top of the arms) either a mask or the picture of a face of a
faun or satyr or some meaningless and ridiculous buffoonery, and (at
the worst) a baboon gaping with open mouth.>>

Cotgrave's definition corresponds perfectly with this: "the figure of
a Maske, Satire, Monkie, or such like apish visages, and ANTICK
resemblances, set on the top of a Scutcheon, or coat of Armes." Baker
describes Falstaff's "pretty slight drollery" as "the sort of fanciful
design with groups of grotesque figures which more of less grew out of
foliage, or sometimes animal forms." This description closely
corresponds with the NED's account of the work ANTIC, which was "used
as equivalent to Italian grottesco, from grotta, " a caverne or hole
under ground' (Florio), apparently adapted from It. ANTICO,...
originally applied to FANTASTIC representations of human, animal, and
floral forms, INCONGRUOUSLY running into one another, found in
exhuming some ancient remains (as the Baths of Titus) in Rome, whence
extended to anything similarly incongruous or bizarre." ANTIC itself
also occurs in two of the passages quoted.
On the other hand, Staunton identifies Falstaff's drollery as
"one of those scenes of coarse humour which the painters of the Dutch
school introduced, between the end of the sixteenth, and the middle of
the seventeenth century," and this agrees very well with the
quotations from Dekker and Evelyn. But it may be that the heraldic
humor described by Saint-Julien and the grotesque fancies of painter
like Bosch and Breughel had enough in common to go by the same name.
The NED. puts the passages from The Tempest, Bartholomew Fair,
and The Wild-goose Chase in a class by themselves to which it assigns
the meaning of "puppet-show." I suggest, however, that in each of them
the other meaning, a grotesque picture, is equally suitable and that
there is no established connection between drollery and puppet-show. I
suspect that Steevens's gloss was derived from the assumption that
since droll means puppet-show, drollery must mean the same thing. If
so, it puts the cart before the horse, for the first recorded use of
droll is almost fifty years later than 2 Henry IV. which introduced
drollery. And indeed the assumption that droll means puppet-show,
though probable enough, is not easily substantiated. The NED does not
differentiate between this meaning of droll from "a farce; and enacted
piece of buffoonery," and of the examples which it collects only one
(from Shaftesbury's Characteristics, 1711) mentions or hints at a
puppet-show and then without making it clear whether the two things
are equivalents or alternatives. Professor Elson, the editor of
Kirkman's drolls, while he allows for the possibility that they were
sometimes acted by puppets, finds no clear evidence to that effect. It
may be suspected, I think, that the eighteenth-century scholars who
first annotated Elizabethan plays for us did not understand that a
stage-piece so elementary as a droll could be played by living actors
and assumed that alternatively it must be a puppet-show. At all
events, droll clearly is of little use in determining the meaning of
drollery during the lifetime of Shakespeare, long before it was
adopted as an English word.
Of the foregoing quotations, the only one that would give the
slightest warrant for connecting drolleries and puppet-shows is that
from Bartholomew Fair, but there the word Puppets, in an apology for
the introduction of them in the play to follow, after so much scorn of
base kinds of entertainment, does not seem to me to explain or to have
any necessary connection with Drolleries. Rather puppet-shows seem to
be excepted from the class to which drolleries belong. On the other
hand, the allusion to ANTIQUES and the announced aversion to making
"Nature afraid" accord perfectly with the idea that a drollery is a
representation of the grotesque of a grotesque representation of the
natural.
In The Tempest, a "living drollery" might just as well mean an
animated grotesque picture as an animated puppet-show. In view of the
lack of clear indications that drollery was used as a name for a
puppet show, it seems to me much sager to understand it in a sense
well established by contemporary usage.
M.A. Shaaber
University of Pennsylvania

**********************************


Droll (OED) to bring FORTH, after the manner of a jester or buffoon

********************************


Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614), Ind., ed. Herford & Simpson vi
(1938), pp. 16f:

If there be never a Servant-monster I' the Fayre; who can help it? He
sayes; nor a nest of ANTIQUES? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his
Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like
Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles, let the
concupiscence of Jigges and Dances, raigne as strong as it will
amongst you: yet if the Puppets will please any body, they shall be
entreated to come in.


<< Of the foregoing quotations, the only one that would give the
slightest warrant for connecting drolleries and puppet-shows is that
from Bartholomew Fair, but there the word Puppets, in an apology for
the introduction of them in the play to follow, after so much scorn of
base kinds of entertainment, does not seem to me to explain or to have
any necessary connection with Drolleries. Rather puppet-shows seem to
be excepted from the class to which drolleries belong. On the other
hand, the allusion to ANTIQUES and the announced aversion to making
"Nature afraid" accord perfectly with the idea that a drollery is a
representation of the grotesque of a grotesque representation of the
natural.
In The Tempest, a "living drollery" might just as well mean an
animated grotesque picture as an animated puppet- show.>> (M.S.
Shaaber)


Drolling Shakespeare:

http://home.att.net/~tleary/GIFS/DROUS.JPG

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Frighting Nature:

"The tunic, coat, or whatever the garment may have been called at the
time, is so strangely illustrated that the right hand-side of the
forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the backpart, and so
give[s] a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not
unnatural to assume was intentional and done with express object and
purpose" (Gentlemen's Tailor Magazine April 1911)
"It will be seen that the eyes are both drawn as right eyes
instead of the normal right and left. This was discovered some years
ago by Lord Brian, the eminent Harley Street Neurologist, who pointed
out that the angle made by the lids of an eye where they meet nearest
the nose is less acute than the angle at the inner half of the upper
lid itself is narrower than the outer half.
The nose is out of alignment, as the middle of the upper lip is
under one nostril"

**********************************
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face ; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

*********************************
Harvey: maumet/puppet

Nashe, the APE of Greene: Greene, the APE of Euphues; Euphues, the
APE
of Envie, the three famous MAUMETS of the press, and my three
notorious
feudists, draw all in a yoke, but some scholars excel their masters,
and some lusty blood will do more at a deadly pull than two or three
of
his yoke-fellows. It must go hard, but he will emprove himself the
incomparable darling of immortal vanity. Howbeit his friends could
have
wished he had not shown himself to the world such a ridiculous
Suffenus
or SHAKErley to himself, by advancing the triumphal garland upon his
own head before the least skirmish for the victory, which if he ever
obtained by any valiancy, or bravure (as he weeneth himself the
valiantest and bravest actor that ever managed pen), I am his bondman
in fetters, and refuse not the humblest vassalage to the sole of his
boot. Much may be done, by close confederacey, in all sorts of
cozenage
and legerdemain; Monsieur Pontalais in French, or Messer Unico in
Italian, never devised such a nipping comedy as might be made in
English of some leaguers in the quaint practices of the crossbiting
art, but I have seen many bearwards and butchers in my time, and have
heard of the one what belongeth to APES, and have leaned of the other
not to be afraid of a dozen horned beasts, albeit some one of them
should seem as dreadful as the furious dun cow of Dunsmore heath, the
terrible foeman of Sir Guy. Aesop's Ox, though he be a sure
ploughman,
is but a slow workman, and GREENE'S APE, though he be a nimble
juggler, is no sure executioner. Yet well worth the master-APE and
captain-MAUMET that had a hatchet as well as Pap, a country cuff as
well as a fig, a crab-tree cudgel as well as a nut, something of a
man's face, etcetc.

******************************
Mawmet \Maw"met\, n. [Contr. fr. Mahomet.]
A PUPPET; a doll; originally, an IDOL, because in the Middle Ages
it
was generally believed that the Mohammedans worshiped images
representing Mohammed. [Obs.] --Wyclif. Beau. & Fl.

*******************************

The Beautified Shakerley? Groatsworth
"...Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not
warned:
for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave: those
PUPPITS (I mean) that speake from our mouths, those ANTICKS garnisht
in
our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene
beholding : is it not like that you, to whom they all have been
beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once
of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow,
beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers Hart wrapt in a
Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke
verse as the best of you : and being an absolute Johannes fac totum,
in
his own conceit the onely SHAKE-scene in a countrie. O that I might
intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: &
let those APES imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint
them with your admired inventions.
(snip)
In this I might insert two more, that both haue writ against these
buckram Gentlemen: but lette their owne workes serue to witnesse
against their owne wickednesse, it they perseuere to maintaine any
more such peasants. For other new-commers, I leaue them to the mercie
of these PAINTED MONSTERS, who (I doubt not) will driue the best
minded to despise them: for the rest, it skils not though they make a
ieast at them.

******************************
Dennis